John Norquist

Fifty years ago West Side Story laid out the plan: "somewhere we'll find a new way of living" in "peace and quiet and open air." The musical's anti-urban message captured the then-dominant opinionthat cities were crowded and complicated and needed radical intervention. Now we are learning that cities work best when they are well-populated and complicated. Instead of believing something is terribly wrong with cities, municipal leaders think there was something terribly wrong with the post-war policies intended to fix cities.

Recently Boston Mayor Tom Menino and his city council tentatively decided to leave the building. The building being City Hall, designed by Gerhard M. Kallmann, Noel M. McKinnell, and Edward F. Knowles, three Columbia University professors who'd won a nationwide design contest in 1962. The brutalist concrete structure sits in a sterile unloved plaza called Government Center designed by the famous architect I.M.Pei. The mayor, council and their constituents had finally had enough after 40 years of exposure to this depressing modernist icon. They're eying a site on Boston Harbor just a few blocks away and you can bet concrete brutalism won't be part of the plan. As urban living has gained favor in the real estate market, cities and citizens are taking their own opinions of architecture and planning more seriously. The fine grain fabric of cities that post war planners attempted to remove is now seen as a lifestyle amenity that even new suburban developments try to mimic.

Criticism of modernist architecture is not hard to find. Even enthusiastic supporters of modernism concede that the movement fell short of its initial promise, particularly in the delivery of public housing. But, more stunning than the failure of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini Green in Chicago is that America's architectural establishment, which is overwhelmingly modernist, has almost completely withdrawn from any effort to serve the basic needs of people. Our star architects design large scale iconic objects and leave the provision of the remaining ingredients of the community to developers and the specialists they hire—traffic engineers, hvac and sprinkler fitters for example. The modernist style of steel and glass with little ornamentation is normative (just look at any office park). Yet the modernist movement is exhausted, lacking any of the messianic zeal that filled it in the days of Corbusier, van der Rohe and Gropius. In From a Cause to a Style, sociologist Nathan Glazer laments the loss of the idealism and zeal that designers possessed in the post-war period. He finds it ironic that it was "when architects and planners became most concerned with improving the lives of ordinary people... that to present eyes they committed some of their most grievous errors."

From a Cause to a Style is a compilation of previous published essays by Glazer that he's updated. With books piled at my bedside I often skip compilations, but this one succeeds as a book, held together by Glazer's obvious passion for cities—especially New York. In the middle is a sweet chapter on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, co-author of Glazer's most famous book, Beyond the Melting Pot. Moynihan valued cities more than anyone else who ever served in either house of Congress. He also knew, when cities were at their lowest ebb in the mid 1970s that architecture and design were powerful assets for cities. Like Ed Banfield, who wrote The Unheavenly City, Glazer and Moynihan early on understood that cities needed appreciation for their assets even more than sympathy for their pathology.

No one's yet replaced Moynihan's leadership at the Federal level, but help may be on the way as local officials take more active roles in planning and design. Mayors Bloomberg in New York, Daley in Chicago and Villaraigosa in Los Angeles have all embraced design and planning strategies that embrace urbanism. There is also the new urbanist movement, which was created to restore urban form and technique to common practice in the building industry. Glazer credits new urbanists for striving to serve the needs of ordinary people. Perhaps because he is a native New Yorker, he worries that new urbanists focus too much on fixing the burbs and not enough on the cities. New urbanists would counter that we work at all sectors of the urban transect from rural hamlet to big city center because we believe the blessings of urbanism can be calibrated to benefit all human settlement. Whatever doubts he has about new urbanism, Glazer is an inspiration to anyone who appreciates the value of cities and the people who live in them.

John Norquist is President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism and served from 1988 to 2004 as Mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.